How To Completely Migrate The Objects Of On-Prem Domain to Azure Domain So I Can Manage the Azure VM DC Only And Close down The On Prem Server Domain

Question

Hi Guys,
I have an environment in which I have an On-Prem domain controller running the domain "abc.local" and I want to migrate all the contents of the DC to The Azure VM DC which is running a different domain "xyz.co.uk". I couldn't find any documentation that would completely replicate the on-prem objects including group policies to the Azure domain and other methods were not giving me complete control as they were only synchronizing the objects which I cannot manage in Azure DC. There was ADDS which came close to achieving this but it can only be used to replicate on an existing domain, not a different domain. Also, I have a site-to-site connection established so Azure VM DC and On-Prem DC can communicate with each other.

Answer 1

I am not aware of any tools that may allow you to completely migrate Active Directory domain internals into another domain, essentially merging everything. In your case, I would probably rename the "abc.local" domain to "xyz.co.uk" so I can keep everything intact and then use Azure Site Recovery or free V2V Converter to migrate the on-premises domain controller to Azure, replacing the one already running there, unless it already has some objects in it as well.

If the other DC is already used in production, your only option is to keep both domains, migrate the "abc.local" to Azure as well, and set mutual trust/federation between them.

https://woshub.com/rename-active-directory-domain/

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter

Answer 2

Hi Hadi, There are a few pointers here. A VM running a domain in Azure is like any machine you run on-premises. If you want to migrate to Azure, you can either migrate the VM you have now or, as I prefer, create a new VM in Azure and promote this to a domain controller. You can transfer the FSMO roles to the new VM when everything is working and remove the old domain controller. When talking about domain controllers, you must ensure that you have covered everything about DNS, domain lookups, etc., so that clients will know the old domain controller is gone and can connect to the new one. Many environments directly use domain controllers as DNS servers, meaning you need to ensure that DHCP scopes are updated to point to the new domain controller. The above is not a complete guide but a short description of migrating the service into Azure. The second part of your question is that you want to move into a new domain name. This can be a good idea in some cases, but it requires a lot of work. There are tools out there, like Quest, that can ease the transition, but there is still work to be done. If you want this approach, all users, computers, and services must be migrated to the new domain. https://www.quest.com/solutions/active-directory/active-directory-migration.aspx